Advertising using television is well established. In the typical television advertising campaign, advertisers purchase several time slots in which to show a single advertisement. This is because at any one time only a fraction of people are watching a specific television program. Accordingly, advertisers show a single advertisement several times at different times and on different channels to increase the number of people exposed to the advertisement. In addition, the effectiveness of many advertisements increases after being exposed to a viewer on multiple occasions as the advertisement becomes engrained in the viewer's memory.
At some point, advertisements also may lose value and effect after a certain optimum number of views. Different advertisements can have different optimum number of views and the optimum number of views can vary from viewer to viewer. At the present time, advertisers have had to show their advertisements more than the optimum number of times to guarantee adequate coverage for the largest possible audience.
There is, therefore, a need for a method and system that can be used to monitor the number of times an advertisement has been viewed by specific viewers and to replace the advertisement after an optimum number of showings.